President Obama rips GOP opposition to jobs bill

President Barack Obama took the push for his stalled $447 billion jobs plan on the road Monday, telling a North Carolina audience that alternative proposals put forward by his Republican critics amount to little more than sops to the rich that will gut critical regulations and fail to restore economic growth.
My "bill will help put people back to work and give our economy a boost right away," Obama told the crowd at Asheville Regional Airport. "But apparently none of this matters" to GOP leaders.
"I've gone out of my way to find areas of cooperation" with congressional Republicans, the president declared. "We're going to give members of Congress another chance to step up to the plate and do the right thing."

But "if they vote against these proposals again ... then they're not going to have to answer to me. They're going to have to answer to you," he said.
Since Obama's plan was rejected in the Senate -- due to unanimous GOP opposition -- Democratic leaders have decided to try to move it through Congress by breaking it up into a series of smaller legislative proposals.

But Obama's appearance, analysts note, was as much about campaign politics as the bill. The president will spend the next three days on a bus tour through politically pivotal North Carolina and Virginia -- two states carried by Obama in 2008 but considered up for grabs next year.
The crowd repeatedly chanted "four more years" before and during Obama's remarks.
"I appreciate the 'four more years,' but right now I'm thinking about the next 13 months," Obama said. "We don't have time to wait. We've got a choice right now."
Jobs bill fight continues after Senate defeat
Obama's senior strategist, David Axelrod, vowed Sunday that every part of the bill will eventually have a vote.

"The American people support every single plank of that bill, and we're going to vote on every single one of them," Axelrod said on ABC's "This Week."
He would not say which part of the plan would come first.
Republicans will "get a vote on whether they believe we should protect tax breaks for small business owners and middle-class Americans, or whether we should protect tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires," Obama said in a written statement last Tuesday.
Monthlong protests show no sign of abating
Meanwhile, demonstrators in Southern California say they'll gather Monday to protest the GOP's stance on the president's jobs bill. House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and California Reps. Dana Rohrabacher and Ed Royce will be together in the area for a fund-raising event.
"Members of the Courage Campaign, teachers and health care workers will deliver a petition to Speaker Boehner signed by 25,000 Courage Campaign members ... demanding that he hold a vote on President Obama's American Jobs Act," a statement from the demonstrators said.
House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Virginia, indicated over the weekend that there could be agreement on some elements.
"Let's work together. Let's find some of the things in his plan that we agree with and let's go ahead and do that for the American people," he told "Fox News Sunday."
The past week was an indication that "we can come together," Cantor said, citing the passage of three trade bills.

Cantor did not make clear exactly where areas of agreement may be. But he cited the need to help small businesses find capital, unemployment insurance reform, and infrastructure spending as broad ideas for which both sides have expressed support.
But "we're not going to be for tax increases on small businesses," Cantor said of the president's plan.
Republicans filibustered the Senate version of the president's jobs bill last week, though a handful of Democrats had said they would have opposed the measure if it had made it to the chamber's floor.
Among other things, Obama's overall blueprint includes an extension and expansion of the current payroll tax cut, an extension of jobless benefits, new tax credits for businesses that hire the long-term unemployed, and additional money to help save and create jobs for teachers and first responders such as firefighters.

The largest measure in the package is the payroll tax cut, which comes at a projected cost of $265 billion. Employees normally pay 6.2% on their first $106,800 of wages into Social Security, but they are now paying only 4.2%. That break is set to expire at the end of December. Obama wants to cut the tax in half, to 3.1%.

Republicans previously embraced the cut, but have increasingly questioned its economic merit.
A second key measure -- estimated to cost roughly $44 billion -- is the extension of emergency jobless benefits to help the long-term unemployed. Lawmakers first expanded benefits to cover 99 weeks in 2009, and have since reauthorized the expansion five times.
Republicans are at particularly sharp odds with Democrats over how to pay for the plan. GOP leaders oppose a provision that would fund the measure through a 5.6% surtax on annual incomes over $1 million. Republicans have accused the president of engaging in so-called "class warfare," while Democrats argue wealthier Americans need to share in the cost of fiscal responsibility.

The word Obama won't dare to say

Say what you will about the Republican Party's politics, but one thing I think we all can agree on is that they know how to control the message.
Instead of "educated," they say "elitist."
Instead of "the rich," they prefer "job creators."
And in their latest linguistic sleight of hand, the modern-day Houdinis have managed to turn "stimulus" into a four-letter word.


Or at least a word President Barack Obama no longer feels comfortable saying. In 2009, he couldn't say it enough. Now ... well, I didn't hear it once during his jobs speech last week, even though $447 billion in tax cuts and government spending would certainly qualify as being one.
 Perry: 'Stimulus created zero jobs'


But the president and his administration can avoid whatever word they choose in describing the jobs bill; that's not going to change what Republicans say about it:
"With the president traveling the country touting his Stimulus II plan, it is important to understand the lessons from his first stimulus," Republican National Committee Reince Priebus said.
"I suspect I am not the only American asking, if a trillion dollars' worth of stimulus didn't work, why will another $450 billion do the trick?" former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson asked.
"He had $800 billion worth of stimulus in the first round of stimulus. It created zero jobs, $400-plus billion in this package. And I can do the math on that one. Half of zero jobs is going to be zero jobs," said Texas Gov. Rick Perry.


As usual, Republicans are dictating the conversation, this time massaging their response to the president's jobs bill to support their assertion that his $787 billion stimulus package was a failure.
And each day Obama avoids saying the word, he inadvertently gives their claims credibility by appearing to distance himself from his initiative.
Instead of using equivocal language, the president just needs to reclaim the word "stimulus." And he needs to do it now as he tries to sell his jobs bill to the public. After all, it's not like anyone's forgotten the word or the 2009 measure he pushed through Congress. Might as well talk about its successes and shortcomings while trying to help out-of-work Americans, as opposed to being forced to do so in the general election, where such talk will be interpreted as simply trying to help himself.


Besides, the truth is the administration's projections were overly optimistic and failed to meet the president's own mark of keeping the unemployment rate under 8%. Not to mention by its very spending structure, the impact of the stimulus package was not even designed to be felt by the majority of Americans quickly, which may have been wise fiscally but not so politically.
However, even with all of that, for anyone to characterize the stimulus package as a complete failure means he or she either had no idea just how bad the country's economy was or they're just parroting partisan talking points. (Between May 1999 and May 2009, private-sector jobs increased by just 1.1%, the lowest 10-year period since the Depression.)
And I can't help but notice how the chatty Republicans' tongues are tied when it comes to mentioning the 750,000 jobs that were lost on average in the first three months of 2009, during which the stimulus took effect and how that number declined to 35,000 by the beginning of 2010?


And am I the only one who finds it strange that Republican leadership wants to deem the stimulus a failure but fails to mention the studies performed by economists across the political spectrum that credit the stimulus for staving off a depression.
And then there's front-runner Perry calling the president's stimulus package a failure during Monday's debate while not mentioning how he used $6 billion from the first "failed" stimulus package to balance his state's budget. Not sure what they call that in Texas, but in the Midwest we call that hypocrisy.


Maybe I'm just being silly for letting the facts get in the way of a good campaign slogan. Perhaps I'm a bit naive to think the GOP should actually point out the stimulus pros with the cons in hopes of finding a more perfect solution to the country's economic woes.


In any case, it seems Obama's strategy of trying to pass a jobs stimulus package without saying the word "stimulus" just makes talking about the bill more difficult than it has to be. And if he continues to let undecided voters believe the first stimulus package was unsuccessful, what's their motivation for getting behind him and pressuring their representatives to pass the second?
Or even vote for him?